ARE YOU READY FOR POLLINGATE ?
THE POLLING INDUSTRY HAS DECENDED INTO A DARK MORASS OF CHAOS !
I HAVE BEEN A POLLING JUNKY FOR YEARS …SO I FOLLOW THIS STUFF AND KNOW MOST OF THE PLAYERS
2 STORIES ON 2 CONSECUTIVE DAYS HAVE EXPOSED THE WHOLE MESS AND IT’S HILLARIOUS
THERE IS NEW POLLING “AGGREGATE” FIRM FOR THIS ELECTION CYCLE NAMED “50 PLUS 1”
THIS GROUP SPLINTERED OF FROM A POLLING AGGREGATE GROUP THAT WAS RUNNING FOR YEARS CALLED 538 WHICH SHUT DOWN AFTER THE 2024 ELECTION
AGGREGATE POLLING FIRMS COMPILE ALL THE POLLING DATA FROM “TRUSTED” POLLING OUTFITES ( TRUSTED BY THEM )
THE PUBLISH UPDATES 24/7 AND SUPPOSEDLY KEEP THE NATION INFORMED AS TO TRUMP’S PRESIDENTIAL APPROVAL NUMBERS AND THE CONGRESSIONAL BALLOT BALANCE BETWEEN RED AND BLUES…ALSO SIGLE STATE POLLS ARE AGGREGATED.
THERE ARE OTHER AGGREGATORS AS WELL AND MOST ARE CITED IN THED MONTHS WEEKS AND DAYS LEADING UP TO IMPORTANT ELECTIONS.
THE POLSTERS HAVE BEEN ON AGGREGATE WAY WRONG OVER THE LAST 6 CYCLES OR SO. THEY CONSTANTLY UNDERPOLL REPUBLICANS TO THE TUNE OF LIKE 4 TO 8% EARLY IN THE CYCLE AND THEN TOWARDS THE ELECTION DAY THEY COME BACK TO ABOUT A 4% ( ON AVERAGE) POLLING ERROR TOWARDS DEMS
THE WHOLE INDUSTRY IS RIFE WITH CHARLATANS …MOST ARE LEFT LEANING AND SOME HAVE BEEN HISTORICLY BALANCE BUT THIS TIME AROUND HAVE GONE WAY OFF THE RAILS AND LEANED WAY LEFT ( RICH BARIS FOR EXAMPLE) ALTHOUGH RIGHT NOW HE IS FURIOUSLY BACKTRACKING AFTER SEENING THE EARLY VOTE
POLLSTERS SHOULD NOT BE CONFUSED WITH THE SEVERAL GREAT EARLY VOTING ANALYSIS X ACCOUNTS. A COUPLE OF THESE GUYS ARE SPOT ON EVERY CYCLE…IT IS A MUCH MORE DAUNTING AND EXACTING TASK TO READ TYHE EARLY IN PERSON VOTING TEA LEAVES AND THE MAIL IN BALLOTS BECAUSE THE VOTES ARE NOT ACTUALLY COUNTED…SO THESE GUYS USE HISTORUCAL DATA AT THE PRECINCT AND COUNTY LEVEL TO MAKE THEIR ASSESMENTS…ACTUALLY DATA REPUBLICAN WAS THE STAR OF THIS GROUP IN 2024 …BUT SHE IS PRE OCCUPIED WITH SOMETHING FAR MORE IMPORTANT AT THE MONENT…2 ACCOUNTS I FOLLOW WHO HAVE EXCELLENT TRACK RECORDS ARE “LATINX ADJACENT DR.” WHO HAS A WEIRD HANDLE BUT IS TERIFFIC…AND ANALYT SETH KESSEL AMONGST OTHERS
ANYHOW THIS SETS UP THE STORY YOU ARE ABOUT TO EXPLORE SHOULD YOU BE SO INCLINED …I AM POSTING THESE IN THE COMMENT SECTION COPIED FROM THE 50 PLUS 1 SUBSTACK BECAUSE IT IS PARTLY PAWALLED..50 PLUS 1 IS ONE OF THE AGGREGATORS THAT HAS BEEN SCAMMED AND IS INVESTIGATING HOW IT COULD HAVE HAPPENED TO THEM…HINT HINT…YOU ASSHOLES JUST TOOK THESE NEW POLLING OUTFITS AT THEIR WORD …ONE WAS LITERALLY A HIGHSCHOOLER IN HIS MOMS BASEMENT ..BUT YOU NEVER QUESTIONED THEM UNTIL NOW WHEN “SOMEONE” CAME FORWARD AND BLEW THE WHISTLE
STAND BY
Real political reporters use data journalism techniques to catch fakers at “Wedgewood Polls”
Posted on October 20, 2026 9:16 PM by Andrew
Mary Radcliffe, Elliott Morris, Cooper Burton, and Fiftyplusone report:
On Tuesday, Oct. 20, FiftyPlusOne reached out to Wedgewood Polls, a self-professed polling firm, with a request for comment on an investigation we had conducted into their alleged survey research. . . .
We reached out to them to ask who they were and confirm the methodology statement on their website. We were given two names, Jack Sims and Andrew Prater. We were able to independently confirm that Sims had previous experience in the polling industry and reviewed their methodology statement in detail. It is not atypical for a pollster to leave an existing firm, form their own, and self-fund some surveys to build reputation; we had no reason at the time to believe this case was any different. Wedgewood operated as if it were a legitimate polling firm, including collecting money from donors to conduct crowd-funded polls, and sharing raw survey data (which we now have confirmed was fraudulent) with FiftyPlusOne on Oct. 19, 2026.
How did Radcliffe et al. figure out Wedgewood data were fake?
First, in FiftyPlusOne’s data from this vendor [Pollfish, an online survey platform], the ID variable for a person appears as a roughly even mix between a standard string of numbers (e.g., “1234567890”) and a string of numbers prefixed by a hyphen (e.g., “-1234567890”). Second, the transaction identifier correlates almost 1:1 with the time a person submitted their survey. We confirmed with Pollfish that this is the expected behavior of these columns, and verified that data from another pollster who has used the platform also produces patterns that match ours.
However, the respondent and transaction IDs recorded in survey data that Wedgewood provided to FiftyPlusOne do not match these expected patterns. Wedgewood told us it conducted a recent poll of the Mississippi Senate race using the same survey platform that we tested, Pollfish. However, in Wedgewood’s data, the respondent and transaction IDs do not behave the same way they do in FiftyPlusOne’s data, or in data from the third-party pollster we consulted. Additionally, they do not comport with the descriptions of these columns given to us by the survey platform.
These are just two of many factors that make FiftyPlusOne suspicious of the veracity of the polls being published by Wedgewood.
Maybe there’s an innocent explanation . . . OK, maybe not:
We detailed these concerns to Wedgewood and, they publicly responded indicating that their polls were indeed fake.
Where did the suspicion come from? Radcliffe et al. tell the story:
Last week, we received a credible tip from a trusted source that Wedgewood Polls might be faking data. We had received tips about Wedgewood in the past, but this particular tip had something crucial that other reports didn’t: evidence. So we asked Wedgewood to provide us with the raw data from their most recent survey, a Mississippi poll conducted Oct. 12 – 14, 2026 . . . We were already wary of this survey. The poll was released just hours after a prominent race rater, Sabato’s Crystal Ball, had changed its rating of this race from Safe Republican to Likely Republican (somewhat of a surprise to elections watchers) and showed Hyde-Smith up only 4 points over Colom. That’s a notable coincidence.
When we got the raw data from Wedgewood, we found that it was surprisingly clean. For example, the raw, unweighted data was 67 percent white and 31 percent Black, fairly close to what might be a reasonable statewide estimate of around 60 percent white and 37 percent Black. The design effect for the poll, a measure of how much the pollster had to weight the data in order to get a representative sample, was 1.18, which is fairly low. . . .
It’s possible, however, to achieve lower design effects by using quotas or other techniques to construct a more representative sample at the time of recruitment. . . . We double-checked with Wedgewood that they didn’t use quotas to create their sample, which could explain the low design effect. A quota is a mechanism by which a pollster can constrain the sample, to ensure the panel provider returns a certain minimum number or percentage of respondents in each demographic group, and appears to be the only way Pollfish allows researchers to control the demographics of the sample during fielding. They said they didn’t, which made the low design effect especially unusual. But we were still left with a question: Was there anything that actually proved the data was fabricated?
That’s when we decided to try to replicate their survey, to the last detail. . . .
Lots more information at the link.
Radcliffe et al. then step back to survey the bigger picture:
It’s getting easier to conduct low-quality polls — or fake them altogether. . . . the wrongdoing we have uncovered on the part of Wedgewood Polls is just the most recent in a series of cases of pollsters manipulating and fabricating data. . . . AI-powered tools for generating content such as websites, PDFs, and spreadsheets have made it easier for those willing to act in bad faith to produce potentially bogus documentation of results that match the quality of those produced by legitimate research firms.
This reminds me of our recent post, It’s fine to use computer-generated survey responses—if you don’t care about the data anyway!
In this case, “Wedgewood Polls” responded with a social media post describing themselves as “an experimental project to demonstrate the vulnerabilities, lack of oversight, and overall low barrier to entry in the modern political polling industry.” Maybe so, but it’s kind of suspicious that they happened to release this statement on the very day that they got caught.
I continue to think there are too many polls, even just counting the legitimate ones. As I wrote back in 2004, and it’s so much truer now:
The U.S. is over-polled. You might have noticed this during the recent election campaign when national polls were performed roughly every 2 seconds. . . . My complaint is not new, but this recent campaign was particularly irritating because it became commonplace for people to average batches of polls to get more accurate estimators. As news consumers, we’re like gluttons stuffing our faces with 5 potato chips at a time, just grabbing them out of the bag.
There are two problems with all these polls. First, they’re a waste of time and money. Millions of people wasting time answering polls. Instead they could be planting flowers, cooking dinner, enjoying themself in some way. The second problem is that all these useless polls have decreased people’s willingness to participate in surveys (for example, of public health) that could have general benefit.
The problem with horserace journalism is: first, journalism resources are limited, and effort that goes into horserace journalism could crowd out more valuable journalism; second, it can degrade public discourse.
The connection of too many polls and too much horserace journalism is that they feed on each other: the polls provide headlines for horserace journalism, and horserace journalism motivates more polls.
Throwing fake polls into the mix makes things that much worse. Good job by Radcliffe et al. to catch these particularly noxious offenders.
WEDGWOOD’S CONFESSION STATEMENT WAS AVAILABLE ONLINE YESTERDAY BUT THE WEBSITE HAS BEEN SCRUBBED…JERE IS COPILOT’S SUMMARY
can’t provide the full text of the statement because it is copyrighted material that was published elsewhere and quoted by news organizations.
However, I can provide a detailed summary of what Wedgewood Polls said in its October 20, 2026 statement:
The organization claimed it was essentially a “fictional entity” created by people with polling-industry experience.
It said the purpose was to test how easily a new polling firm with little scrutiny could gain credibility.
It admitted that most of the polling numbers it had released were fabricated rather than based on genuine survey data.
It argued that major media outlets, polling aggregators, and commentators accepted and repeated its results without sufficient verification.
It described the project as a “wake-up call” intended to expose weaknesses in media vetting and polling oversight.
Critics, including researchers at FiftyPlusOne, disputed the firm’s characterization and argued the confession occurred only after an investigation was about to expose problems in its data.
This is now the third controversy involving questionable pollsters this cycle:
Median Strategies admitted publishing fabricated polls in August.
Wedgewood Polls admitted that most of its polls were fabricated.
SoCal Strategies is now under investigation and appears to have gone dark before providing requested evidence.
More pollster funny business uncovered by FiftyPlusOne
A shady pollster from sunny California just disappeared from the internet, a few days after FiftyPlusOne asked to verify its data
Mary Radcliffe, G. Elliott Morris, Cooper Burton, and FiftyPlusOne
5 hours ago
Following FiftyPlusOne’s investigation into suspected data fabrication by individuals claiming to work for Wedgewood Polls, today we are publishing the results of a parallel investigation into an associated pollster known as SoCal Strategies.
When an anonymous source first reached out about Wedgewood Polls, they also divulged information to FiftyPlusOne that cast doubt on the authenticity of some (not all) polls published by SoCal Strategies. The article below summarizes what we found after looking into these claims.
On Tuesday, Oct. 20, FiftyPlusOne conducted an interview with a person affiliated with SoCal Strategies. Since that interview, FiftyPlusOne has been waiting for a statement and additional information that the person indicated they would send this week. However, as of this morning, according to the Washington Post, the website for SoCal Strategies and a previously active Twitter/X account, @SocalStrategies, have been taken offline. The Substack page where SoCal Strategies posted poll results has also gone dark.
We reached back out to the person we spoke to earlier in the week by phone and email today, but as of publication, we have not yet heard back. Because it is policy here at FiftyPlusOne not to aggregate data from pollsters we cannot get in contact with, and because we have received credible claims of wrongdoing from multiple sources, and further because we cannot verify basic legal information about the business SoCal Strategies or biographical details about the people involved, FiftyPlusOne will no longer collect surveys published by SoCal Strategies. Two previous surveys whose authenticity has been disputed will be removed from our database. Other polls (mostly from before May 2026) conducted by SoCal Strategies will remain.
Our investigation into SoCal Strategies started last week
The inciting information for our investigation came from FiftyPlusOne’s anonymous source, who mentioned to us they were unclear who was currently running a firm called SoCal Strategies. According to this source, an individual named Jack Sims, who was implicated in our investigation into Wedgewood Polls, used to work at the firm. The firm was also registered in the state of Florida to Sims in March of 2025.
Last week, we reached out to the email account listed on the SoCal Strategies website to confirm who was running the firm. We received a reply from a person identifying themselves as Wilson Rochford, saying that Sims had left the firm nearly a year ago, and that Rochford has always been the lead pollster at SoCal Strategies.
This makes sense to us. In 2024, when SoCal Strategies first began publishing polls (originally under the name “SoCal Research”), members of the FiftyPlusOne staff vetted them for FiveThirtyEight. At the time, we were told Rochford, then a high school student, was conducting the surveys and had previous experience as an intern with Probolsky Research. We confirmed that detail with a representative for Probolsky, reviewed their methodology statement, and began aggregating their surveys. Earlier this week, FiftyPlusOne independently reconfirmed this career history for Wilson Rochford.
As we continued our investigation into Wedgewood, we asked for an interview with Rochford, who we believed to be reaching through the email account listed on the SoCal Strategies website, to clarify details of his previous relationship with Sims. The person identifying himself as Rochford told us that “as far as conducting the polling, [Sims] didn’t actually have a big role. It was just things like running the business,” and suggested that Sims did not have the polling knowledge to conduct surveys on his own. The person identifying himself as Rochford promised to send us raw data to verify a few disputed surveys by Friday, Oct. 23.
But after the Wedgewood story was published, we received a flood of tips about who was behind the firm. Although the person identifying himself as Rochford denied any involvement in his conversation with us, multiple tweets and DMs from the X account @wedgewoodpol use his name in connection with the firm.
Zachary Donnini, head of data science at VoteHub, also tweeted that he spoke to the head pollster at Wedgewood, who said he was a student at Boston University that had previously worked with SoCal Strategies. That profile does not match Andrew Prater or Jack Sims, who Wedgewood identified as the pollsters behind their firm, but it does match biographical details about Rochford, which FiftyPlusOne confirmed via the Boston University student directory and a social media page belonging to one of Rochford’s family members. We’ve also seen emails between Wedgewood and a potential client that indicated their team had previous experience at Probolsky Research. We confirmed with a representative for Probolsky that only Rochford had ever worked with them; they had no knowledge of Sims or Prater.
We also received allegations that Rochford was not involved at all, and that other people, possibly Sims, were fraudulently using his name and profile in connection with Wedgewood. One source told us that the phone number we were given to speak with Rochford was in their records as belonging to Sims; the number is registered to TextNow, an app that provides free phone numbers to use for texting and calling, so we cannot independently verify to whom it belongs. While there are rumors swirling that only one person is involved, we can at least verify that Sims, Prater, and Rochford all exist and are connected to polls in some way.
We shared a short clip of audio from our conversation with the person identifying himself as Rochford with a person who knows Jack Sims personally, and they told us that the voice on the call was not Sims. Another source who spoke with someone claiming to be Sims said the voice matched the person they spoke with, but they only had a phone conversation, so we cannot verify definitively whether the person they spoke to was Rochford or Sims. We attempted to contact a person named Wilson Rochford at his student email address and did not receive a reply.
In an attempt to verify that Wilson Rochford was actually involved and not just a victim of identity theft, we reached out to a family member on social media about this situation. We did not receive a reply, but it was hours after this contact that SoCal Strategies’ online presence was deleted.
I never answer polls, and when someone comes around in person, I tell them undecided. If you are a politician, stand up for what you believe in, don’t believe in the polls indicate you should believe in. It’s the whole facade, I’ll support whatever the majority support so I can get elected, sell barrels of wine that have no wine in them, and take money from special interest groups. Money is the root of most evil with egomaniacs and charlatains.